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what am I doing here?

in which susan proceeds to get caffienated and knit all day. if only I could get paid to drink coffee and knit... that would so be the shiz-knit.

and the angels rejoice! 1.30.2006 |


hooray! happy chinese new year and happy finished clapotis!! so hank #7 finally made it to my mailbox on saturday afternoon. amazingly, it was the same dye-lot as the rest of the yarn. what are the chances? the color I was using was sold out everywhere by the time I realized I needed more and this was the last place that seemed to carry it. they were all from dye-lot 'A'. it must've been one huge lot, since the first six hanks I bought came from canada. anyway, it's done! and now I'm trying to decide whether or not to block it. and I'm also wondering how come the girl on knitty looks so much cuter in hers than I look wearing mine. I think I need to go to france and try wearing it there.

I must mention how much I love my mobilemate by sandisk. how else would I be able to post pictures on my blog while at work? consider this a shameless plug for the best flash products in the world. everyone go and buy sandisk stuff now. go. right now.

keeping busy 1.27.2006 |


I had to find some way to keep my knitting needles busy last night while I watched dancing with the stars, so I decided to use up that rowan ribbon twist I bought a few weeks ago at knitting arts' big sale. so I made this hat out of rowan's "big easy" pattern book. there's not much to say about it. it was the first hat I've knitted from the top down, which was kinda interesting. but, where in the world am I going to wear a wool hat with earflaps? and it kinda makes me look like I'm wearing a helmet, since my hair is so short - especially if I tie the strings under my chin. hence no picture of me wearing it. but it was fun and quick and easy to make. and I think it's kinda cute. I just have no idea what I'm going to do with it.

this time, it's not my fault 1.26.2006 |


oh, the sadness... I am nearing the end of hank #6 for clapotis (see the sad remains over there to the left) and I just got an email saying that hank #7 only shipped yesterday! I ordered it a week ago... I guess the problem with ordering yarn from some random place with cheap prices is that sometimes they forget to send out your order. *sigh* she refunded me one whole dollar to make up for it. I thought, well, that's nice, I guess, but maybe she shoulda sent it overnight to really make up for it. but I guess that just puts clapotis on hold yet again. no biggie - I've got plenty of other things to keep me busy. like figure out how to make captions for pictures.

by the way, it seems like everyone and their mother are making clapotis! what is the plural of that? clapotises? anyway, I think I got on the claoptis wagon kinda late. I feel so not cool. but at least I'm having fun. dropping stitches = woot!

I've also seen a bunch of other people's blogs about the knitting olympics and I am intrigued! but also rather daunted. people are doing some really ambitious stuff. I keep thinking that I should try and do isa's sweater, but I honestly don't think I can do it. so not the olympic spirit, huh? that's why I didn't do sports in high school. I was too lazy and would rather watch tv and/or sleep. maybe instead of doing the knitting olympics, I should start running again. or maybe I should just watch the olympics on tv and/or take a nap.

blog envy 1.25.2006 |


so, I've been reading/looking at a bunch of other crafty blogs lately and I am suffering from some serious blog envy. and I'm like, dude, no one is going to want to read my blog! I mean, I totally skip over blogs that don't have pictures. I'm sure everyone else does it too. how boring is a picture-less blog?? so I resolve to start putting pictures up. starting with this one, which is stolen from one of the blogs of one of the guys from my sister church. this is a sampling of their wonderful work. not bad, huh?

sippin' n' knittin' 1.24.2006 |

orangemoo and I got together for the first time in months to do some sippin' and knittin' last night. it was like old times... just catching up on each other's lives while catching up on our neglected knitting projects. how often does one get to sit and relax with a good friend over some mediocre coffee and just knit for hours? not often enough, if you ask me.

the good news is that I managed to make some serious progress on clapotis! I got to the end of the straight section and it is now time to decrease. I cannot wait to be done! I actually ended up needing to order one more hank because I must have miscalculated or something and am going to end up short. my only hope is that hank #7 arrives before I get to the end of hank #6. but, at the rate I'm going, I don't think that's going to be a problem.

by the way, I am so addicted to craigslist. I mean, it is an unhealthy obsession that is going to be a serious problem if I don't stop myself soon. actually, not just craigslist. I find myself shopping online for an alarming amount of time each day. my boss needs to give me more work to do or else I'm going to be sending myself to the poor house. at least I'll have lots of fun toys when I get there. and enough yarn to build myself a little yarn-house. that doesn't sound so bad... tonight, I'm planning on driving out to oakley to buy a wagon. oakley! I didn't even know that was a real place. I thought it was sunglasses.

'just because I knit and purl it doesn't mean that I'm a girl' 1.16.2006 |

so, months ago - in october - I got an email from a friend asking me for an outrageous favor. outrageous. apparently, the boys at my sister church wanted to knit scarves for the girls as a thank you for the wonderful brothers' appreciation that they put on. so I guess it was more of a you're welcome gift, since it was the brothers who were being appreciated, which is essentially a thank you... but I digress.

anyway, what possessed this group of supposed men to pursue knitting is beyond me. not only would they have to suffer through the potentially difficult learning process, they would have to endure the ridicule of other men, friends, family, bartenders, other people's families, their girlfriends/wives and maybe even the other women as well. wouldn't a thank you card say it just as nicely? well, probably not.

it was great fun teaching them. quite a few guys attended our first session. not as many came the second time - perhaps it was too time consuming for some of them. a few of them caught on pretty quickly and managed to churn out a bunch of nice scarves in the end. even the ones that had a bit of a harder time still produced very nice, even, beautiful scarves that the women loved. I was so impressed with them. go boys!

I wonder if any of them will stick with it. it was definitely amusing to hear them talk shop yesterday. after they had distributed the lovely handmade gifts to the oohs and aaahs of the much appreciative girls, they were able to finally talk in public about all the frustration and humiliation and satisfaction that came from their new found skill. throwing around knitting terms like it was part of their everyday vernacular brought a big smirk to my face and a swell of pride in my heart.

although I may have occasionally ridiculed them for the decrease in their machismo, I am proud of my little students. I had really wanted to teach just one boy to knit for a long time, and I was suddenly given a chance to teach a whole room of them all at once! the scarves really did come out wonderfully and I know the boys are proud of their work too. I hope you all feel accomplished and a little more well-rounded, thanks to just a pair of knitting needles and a few skeins of yarn. at the very least, you've got my respect for not backing down from a potentially daunting, demasculating task. way to go, guys!

stranger anxiety - not just for babies 1.13.2006 |

the girls and I decided to start meeting together again, which I'm pretty excited about. it's been a long time since we've regularly done anything without babies present. we opted to get together thursday night and pick a book, have some coffee and just enjoy being us girls outside of the house. it was nice.

so, I'm in this yahoo group that meets up weekly to knit and hang out. I have never attended one of the knitting nights, but I always read the emails that people send and once in a while I will contribute too. in kind of a weird coincidence, my girl friends and I ended up at the same place at the same time as the knitting group. I considered going over and introducing myself, but then I felt kinda weird about it, since I was there with other people. I've been meaning to attend for a long time - several months - but I am always too tired or unmotivated or whatever to trek down there for people I don't even really know. I think I'm scared of strangers. and I kept sneaking looks at them just to see if they were weirdos, but I didn't want them to think I was a weirdo for looking at them. and I also didn't want them to remember what I look like just in case I do meet up with them sometime and they would be all 'hey, aren't you that girl that kept giving us funny looks that one time from over there?' I've got some serious issues.

I brought my clapotis to work today in the hopes that I might actually work on it. chances are I'll probably end up reading craigslist all day instead...

squares make me round 1.11.2006 |


I have a bag of ghirardelli dark chocolate squares at my desk. whose genius idea was it to package these and then give out buy one get one free coupons so that naive consumers such as myself take it upon themselves to get two bags and then unwittingly keep them within arm's reach on their desks at work? and by 'keep' I mean 'eat'. and by 'eat' I mean 'eat them all'. this, of course, means I need to knit really fast tonight to burn off these extra calories.

and I wonder if this 'daily allowance of saturated fat' they list on the package means just my chocolate allowance or all the food I consume in a day... and who decided how much fat I'm allowed? and how do they decide how big a serving is? shouldn't I get to decide these things for myself? isn't this america??

the good news.

on a slightly unrelated note, pistachios are tasty.

procrastination station 1.09.2006 |

here is a link to my past projects.

so, I decided to start this blog and chronicle the progress of my many many projects. maybe this will actually help me to get things done, since if I'm publicly (or at least bloggily) humiliated for having nothing to show for all the knitting I do, I would feel pressure to actually finish stuff. and maybe I can also learn to write in paragraphs.

currently, I don't have any gifts under construction, so there are no secrets to be kept and I can freely post whatever I want. well, I suppose I'm making some things for isa, but I don't think she reads my blog, and I don't really consider them gifts, so I'm not worried about her finding out about them. maybe the reason that I'm such a slacker with these projects is because they're for myself and I don't have any deadlines. I'm really quite lenient on myself. which is nice for me. but what's not so nice for me is that I don't have any fun finished knitted things to wear.

so, let's take a quick inventory of things I've got half-finished and occupying various corners of my home. I should post some pictures, but it's so embarrassing just thinking about them that I don't think I need to provide photographic evidence. the saddest part is that everything is taking up needles because I keep telling myself that I'm going to pick up whatever project tonight and work on it. putting things on stitch holders is like admitting that I'm a procrastinator. plus, I don't even think I have enough holders to hold all the stuff I'm "working on". sadness.

anyway, so here is my list:

isa's striped zippie hoodie - this is my greatest source of shame because it is sooo far from being finished that I think I need to take it apart and make it one size bigger. the thing that is stopping me is the fact that it took me about a thousand years to get to the point where I stopped and it makes me want to cry thinking about starting over... it's made with baby ull from dale of norway from a dale of norway pattern.

clapotis from knitty.com - I thought this looked so cool, but I so could not afford the lorna's laces that the pattern called for. so I picked up some noro instead, which is not as nice. but it is a very fun project - I had to put it down because of christmas presents I was working on. and so, it has not been touched since about november. I'm almost halfway thru.

blackberry, also from knitty.com - I really want to make a sweater for an adult. an adult named me. because I'm selfish like that. and I am also altruistic like that, because who would want to wear my first experiment in adult sweaters? it's probably going to come out all funky. I say this because I decided to use lion thick & quick because it is considerably cheaper than the rowan that this pattern calls for. I couldn't *quite* obtain the correct gauge, which is what is going to make this even more interesting... but, anyway, this pattern looked fast. I'm about halfway done with the back.

a hat - I went to the knitting arts sale the other day and wandered around the store for a long time thinking about how I'd driven all the way to saratoga and wanting to buy about $300 worth of stuff, but knowing that I couldn't, and trying to pick "just one thing" to get. it was excruciating. I don't know why I torment myself so. so I picked up some rowan ribbon twist to make a hat. I kinda started, but I'm about to start over.

short-row scarf - this looked fun. I'm making it with some light green yarn I bought off elann.com. I think I'm about halfway through this one too...

I think that's it for things that I've started and not finished... or I could be in denial about other things that have sat for longer than the last couple months. there are also numerous projects for which I've already purchased yarn, but have not yet started. and I am trying to stop myself from further starting and not finishing projects. at least until the ones I've already started are finished... and we'll see how that goes...

I don't want to feel like too much of a loser for not even being able to follow through on things that I actually love doing. let's hope this year holds more finished projects than last year, and an ever diminishing yarn stash, too! :) whee!